A tale of love and darkness

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It is not every day that one of the world's master
storytellers turns the microscope on himself and unflinchingly
examines the wellsprings of his personal and creative life. Amos
Oz, Israel's best-known and possibly most accomplished novelist and
political essayist, has done just that in this superbly crafted and
profoundly moving memoir.

His mother's suicide, when he was just 12 years old, is the
harrowing "tale of darkness" that lies at the core of Oz's story.
It left him hurt, angry, betrayed and, above all, full of guilt and
self-loathing: "All mothers love their children," he writes,
"that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of
criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. . . . The fact that
only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only
proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve
love."

Fortunately for Oz, he was not engulfed by that darkness, nor
has he allowed it to cloud his work. Indeed, there is a great deal
more love than darkness, both in his fiction and in this
life-affirming memoir.

Oz recreates, with bitter-sweet nostalgia, the pre-1948
Jewish-Arab Jerusalem he grew up in as the only child of two deeply
unhappy, misplaced immigrants, Aryeh and Fania Klausner. This was
home until, about two years after his mother's suicide, he went to
live on a kibbutz - the iconic creation of the self-assured,
muscular new Jew, as far removed as is imaginable from the
claustrophobic intellectual-immigrant world of his parents. He even
rejected his Diaspora-Jewish name Klausner in favour of Oz, Hebrew
for "strength, force, boldness".

Characteristically, he learned to recognise that this "old
Jew/new Jew" dichotomy is a false one. Indeed, it is a leitmotif
that runs through Oz's work that obsession with polarity of any
kind - Israel/Diaspora, Jew/Arab, and even, perhaps especially,
man/woman - is both reductive and destructive. His task as a writer
is to explore the common ground, to seek the self in the other, the
other in the self.

We meet dozens of marvellous characters, each drawn with the
economy, insight and gentle irony that are hallmarks of Oz's
storytelling.

His mother Fania, hardly surprisingly, occupies centre stage as,
seeking the roots of his family tragedy, Oz traces the trajectory
that took her from her idealistic girlhood in an increasingly
hostile Poland to the dark basement flat in Jerusalem where she
sunk deeper and deeper into her final, fatal depression.

She is portrayed as the tragic victim of a failed, perhaps
impossible, Zionist dream: "My mother grew up surrounded by an
angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally
dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone."

Poles apart from his tragic mother is his wife of 45 years, Nily
- the vivacious, always-singing epicentre of light and joy in his
life: "the clapper in the bell" - who he met on the kibbutz and who
restored and has sustained his belief in the capacity to love, and
be loved.

Then there is his Grandma Shlomit, who took one horrified look
at the hot, dirty, smelly, raucous Palestine she arrived in as a
reluctant refugee in 1933, and pronounced: "The Levant is full of
germs."

For the rest of her life she doused everything with Lysol and
took three hot baths a day to keep the germ-filled Levant at bay;
she died some 25 years later - in her bath! As if there weren't any
germs in the Europe she had escaped from, Oz comments wryly, "not
to mention all sorts of other noxious things".

There are some moments of high farce, as when Oz recounts how
Menachem Begin, former leader of the Irgun underground and hero of
his staunchly right-wing family, complained at a public meeting in
Jerusalem, shortly after Israel was born, that while the world was
rushing to "arm" the new state's Arab enemies, no one was willing
to "arm" Israel. "If only I were prime minister today," Begin
declaimed, "everyone, everyone, would be arming us!
Ev-ery-one!!!"

Unfortunately, Begin, who had learnt his somewhat bombastic
Hebrew in his native Poland, used the archaic word "lezayen"
for the verb "to arm". To young Amos's ears, attuned to the much
less formal vernacular Hebrew of his native-born generation, the
word lezayen had another meaning entirely: "to fuck".

To the horror of his family, as silence descended on the hall,
he burst into uncontrollable laughter and his mortified grandfather
had to drag him out by his ear. So ended any attachment Oz might
have had to his family's right-wing political allegiances.

Much more sombre is his harrowing account of another epiphany: a
childhood visit to the home of a prominent Arab family, the
Silwanis, in east Jerusalem. The young Amos, then about eight, was
sent out to play in the garden with the children.

Conscious of his role as representative of the Jewish People
Come Home to Zion, he was determined to demonstrate to his Arab
hosts - especially the comely 12-year-old Aisha and her little
brother Awwad - what a fine fellow he was. He regaled them with his
culture and erudition, reciting the poems of Zionism's leading
poets (including one of his own) before going on to demonstrate
that this New Jew could not only recite poetry, but could climb
trees, too.

"Trembling with the thrill of national representativity," he
scaled the large mulberry tree in the Silwani garden. At the top he
found an old iron ball attached to a rusty chain. Grabbing hold of
the chain, he whirled the ball in wild circles around his head,
whooping loudly. "Now at last was muscular Judaism taking the
stage, making resplendent new Hebrew youth at the height of his
powers, making everyone who sees him tremble at his roar; like a
lion among lions."

Then disaster struck. The rusty chain snapped and the heavy iron
ball hurtled earthward. It just missed smashing the skull of
three-year-old Awwad, but slammed into his foot, crushing it.

Oz remembers little of the mayhem that followed, but indelibly
etched in his consciousness was the look of "loathing, despair,
horror and flashing hatred" that the little boy's sister, Aisha,
gave him. The seed was sown of his deep and abiding revulsion for
chauvinism of any sort - that mindless, corrosive national
self-assertiveness that denies the other and crushes not only the
body but the soul of victim and perpetrator alike.

Ultimately, Oz is, above all else, a wonderfully perceptive and
sensitive chronicler of human emotion - something he can capture
and convey in a few simple words. Thus his touching description of
how he reacts when his wife Nily responds favourably to his work:
"When she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me
a certain look, and the room gets bigger." So too, when one reads a
book like this, does the reader's.